Jim Handy, Objective Analysis, on SSDs

Nimbus Upgrades both Software and Hardware

Nimbus Data made a dual announcement on Monday, introducing an upgrade to the company’s zero-license-fee Halo storage management software and announcing volume shipments of the new Gemini storage array.

The Halo storage software, which already boasts a rich feature set, has added a new API, a mobile access to performance information, and powerful analytics tools that track and report over 200 metrics in real time with unlimited scroll-back.

The Nimbus Gemini system has already been shipping for a couple of months and is finding acceptance in various markets: Analytics, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and Scientific. The largest Gemini 2U system, which Nimbus claims has the greatest raw capacity per rack unit, weighs in at 48TB raw, 336TB compressed, and can handle up to 1 million virtual machines.

The SSD Guy was impressed by the graphic for this post, which compares the space requirements for a 5 million IOPS Gemini against those of a competing production system. (Click on the picture for a larger rendition.) The chart may look just like the one that every single solid state storage vendor uses, the one that compares their SSD-based system against a competing HDD-based system, but in this example Nimbus is comparing its own system against a competitor’s flash-based system!

Nimbus claims to be the first storage system, either SSD-based or HDD-based, to use the new 16Gb/s Fibre Channel interface. (They tell me that all of the 16Gb FC interfaces shipped to date are on the server side rather than on the storage side.) The company adopts fast interfaces early to assure that the internal bandwidth of their flash is not throttled by insufficient network bandwidth. Nimbus doesn’t want the system bottleneck to simply move from storage to the network.

It’s a pretty impressive announcement from an impressive company. I’ll be interested to see what Nimbus achieves as the company progresses.